Yemeni Flight Survivor 14-Year-Old Girl, Not 5-Year-Old Boy

July 1, 2009

Just in case you’re seeing news of that Yemeni plane crash today that includes reports of the sole survivor as a 14-year-old girl and wondering, “what happened to the 5-year-old boy sole survivor we were reading about yesterday?” — the earlier reports turned out to be inaccurate, and many popular news sources have, annoyingly, updated the story without noting the change. That’s life at internet speed for you. Anyway the survivor, Bahia Bakari, was flying from Paris to Comoros with her mother, who is presumed lost; the crash threw her clear of the plane and into the ocean, where she clung to floating debris for 12 hours before rescue. She has a broken collarbone but it expected to recover.